Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856
Flaubert invented free indirect discourse here: narration that inhabits a character's consciousness without being them. That single technical innovation changed the course of fiction. Emma Bovary herself is the first great portrait of someone destroyed by the gap between imagination and reality. Every realist novelist owes a debt.
The case against
Everything depends on prose you probably can't read. Flaubert spent five years hunting le mot juste in French; in English you get the plot, which is a tedious woman making tedious choices among people the author openly despises. The agricultural fair is a famous technical feat that reads like one. Admiration comes easy here. Affection almost never does.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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